But actually punishing someone is costly. Imagine a friend of
yours says something nasty to another of your friends. As a
bystander, you could punish Friend A by shunning her or telling
her off — but it might cost you your friendship.

Punishment's costs add up on a societal level as well. Consumers
looking to punish a company for bad business practices might have
to buy a more expensive alternative or do without a product
altogether. And the justice and
prison systems aren't cheap, either. A report released in
January by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice examined the
corrections budgets of 40 states and found that in those states,
the average annual cost of housing an inmate for a year was
$31,166. The total cost of corrections for the 40 states combined
came to almost $39 billion. [ 10
Contested Death Penalty Cases ]

To figure out what motivates people to shoulder these costs,
doctoral candidate Kristin Laurin at the University of Waterloo
in Ontario and her colleagues carried out a series of five
studies with Canadian and American participants.

In one of these studies, participants played a game designed to
measure how willing they were to give up cash for the chance to
punish a wrongdoer. The participant thinks he or she is playing
against two players. Player A gives a certain amount of money to
Player B. If the participant thinks Player A's offer is unfair,
he or she can pay real cash to take away Player A's stash.

The participants, 55 undergraduate students, filled out surveys
about their religious beliefs either before or after playing this
game. The ones who filled out the surveys first were more likely
than the others to have
religion on their minds when they went into the game.

The findings, published Tuesday (May 22) in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggested that when people
believed in a powerful, involved God and when they were reminded
of that belief, they were less likely to punish Player A.

"It seems to be something about the idea that it's the
responsibility of that powerful God to punish people who do
things wrong, and it's not your responsibility as a human being,"
Laurin told LiveScience. [ 8
Ways Religion Impacts Your Life ]

In a similar study, participants reminded of their belief in a
powerful God were less willing to support state-sponsored
punishment for a white-collar criminal.

Religious conflict

When researchers looked at religious beliefs alone, however, they
found that people with stronger beliefs were more likely to
punish others after being reminded of those beliefs.

It may be that the communal aspects of religion encourage people
to support punishing wrongdoers, Laurin said, but then
belief in God might be a way for people to drop the
responsibility of punishment when they'd rather not take on the
cost.

It's also possible that people who believe in a strong and
powerful god might not want to step on the deity's toes by taking
over the role of punisher, Laurin said.

How this push-and-pull between punishment and mercy plays out on
a daily basis is still unknown. There are many reminders of
religion in daily life, Laurin said, especially in courts of law,
where witnesses swear on Bibles and promise to tell the truth "so
help me God."

"It would be really interesting to look at a courtroom that does
that and a courtroom that doesn't do that in terms of how
punitive the outcomes end up being for people who are on trial,"
Laurin
said.